Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The HTTP client
sends a document identifier with or without search words, and the server responds
with hypertext or plain text. The protocol runs over TCP, using one connection
per document request. The browser acts as a pipeline, so that as the bytes arrive
from the server they can be presented to the reader as soon as they arrive.

The
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
is used by web servers
to communicate web
pages to web browsers. HTTP
is used when your browser connects to a web server, requests a web page from
the server, and downloads the page. It
is the
common standard that enables any browser to connect to any server, anywhere
in the world.

HTTP was originally
designed by Tim Berners-Lee to support the
special demands of web communications, with an emphasis on efficiency, and a
target page load time of under a tenth of a second. Modern Internet networks
can
support this type of response provided the page isn't too large and the server
too far
away.

Your
browser can open more than one HTTP connection at once to download different parts
of a web page, downloading the text, graphics, and other objects on the page in
different orders. That is why you may see the status messages in the bottom of
your browser window switch between a message like "downloading 62% of 15K" to
"downloading 38% of 47K" on the same page -- there are different HTTP connections.

Some browsers
enable you to specify the download priorities so that, for example, graphics are
not loaded, text is loaded before graphics, everything is loaded at once, etc.
Check your individual browser preferences.

Resources. The following resources provide more information about HTTP: